Saturday, April 5, 2014

All in a Day

It's finally happened. It took ten and a half months, but the inevitable finally occurred: I got hit by a bike on my way to work.

Let me paint a picture for you. There is a sidewalk. The sidewalk is loaded with parked scooters and bicycles, vendors selling toenail clippers and smelly food, somebody doing open-air welding with construction parts all around, there are cars parked every which way. I cannot walk on the sidewalk. There is a bike path. The bike path is teeming with pedestrians, bikers, people on scooters food vendors, small trucks, and pretty regularly cars that honk incessantly like you're walking on THEIR bike path.

There is a blue truck parked, blocking half the bike path and it's hard to see around it. Because of this, people should make an effort to slow down, be slightly more conscientious.

They don't.

The parked blue truck is longer than I thought it was. I saddle up next to the side of it. An older man on a bike comes at an alarming speed around the truck right in my direction. I shimmy to the right to try to avoid him. He points his bike at me. I continue to shimmy to the right, but a little faster and he does, too, apparently not as concerned as me about the encroaching impact. This is mostly because he's gazing off into the horizon, seemingly unaware that there are too many people trying to squeeze past this truck. I've almost made it to the curb, but I really, really, really want to avoid stepping on the sewer grate, festooned with various pieces of trash, discarded food, and generally weird, wet, smelly things. Just as I try to lunge for the curb, he hits my left leg.

Could he have just kept going straight? Yes. Could he have gone right? Yes. Could he have actually looked up and/or ahead to see that I was right in front of him? Yes. Did he care? Not one iota. In fact, he didn't say A SINGLE THING - not that I would have known if he were apologizing anyway, but the fact that he didn't kind of gives you some idea of the frequency with which this probably happens - and just drove away merrily as I muttered some curse words and brushed the dirt of my black pants.